Fudoki (14 page)

“I am nothing and no one,” the tortoiseshell woman said. “I have no ground.”

The noblewoman looked at her from the corner of her eyes. “Ah. The Buddha says that this is the way to wisdom, to understand that family and property are nothing. How enlightened of you.”

“This Buddha is wrong, if it says that,” the tortoiseshell woman said, her voice hot, anguished. “Family and tale are
everything
.”

The noblewoman smiled, but her eyes were suddenly sad. “And you have lost both, I surmise. I am so sorry. Such loss I can understand.”

Somehow, though she never later understood how, when the tortoiseshell woman climbed out of the ox-carriage and returned to her sorrel, it was understood that she would travel with them. And that was how she met Osa Hitachi no Nakara.

I had friends
when I was a small girl, before I came to my half-brother’s court. Most were boys, and were inevitably of lower rank, but I loved them dearly. Their toys were so much more interesting than my own—mulberry bows and mugwort arrows, stilts, riding whips made of vine, hoops, and mock swords—and they could do so much more. They played between the horses in the stable and chased mayflies across the garden. They ran the streets around my home in the eastern quarter of town, all equally ragged and breathless, and told me stories of their achievements, when I could sneak away to see them.

I could not join them, but I had my own interests. I used to watch vermin, green caterpillars eating lacework holes into leaves; ants running about or walking in formal trains, bearing gifts to shrines hidden deep underground. When my attendants restricted this (“Squatting like a peasant? My lady!”), I bribed the household boys with rice candy to bring me things—moths’ wings and beetle shells and birds’ eggs—whatever my interest of the moment was.

I eventually discovered mice, when a boy caught one in the gardens and brought it to me, a tiny black-eyed brown thing crouching in a tall lacquered box. Its whiskers were finer than silk thread drawn taut. Carrying it in my hands, I asked a gardener who knew of such things to tell me of mice. As I watched and listened, tiny pellets appeared from the creature’s hindquarters, black with a small earthy smell. The gardener told me such creatures slept in cracks and crevices and ate seeds and grasses. “A small life, and a short one,” he said. “Everything eats them—dogs, hawks, owls, foxes.”

I frowned and shifted the mouse to my other hand, shaking the soiled one clean. “Then what’s the point of being a mouse? They’re not going to learn anything, so they’ll just have to come back as a mouse again next time. What’s the good of that?”

The gardener laughed a little. “Maybe that
is
the point of being a mouse, little one—being eaten. Maybe the lesson they learn is grace in the face of unavoidable tragedy.”

This made sense to me:
monogatari
tales are full of women (and sometimes men) dying gracefully. But—” What’s graceful about mice? They don’t write little poems before they die, or throw themselves into Uji river because their lover forgets to visit”—for my nurse had been reading to me from Genji’s tale.

He laughed louder. “You think most people face tragedy with poems? No—we are a lot like mice. Some of us squirm under the cat’s paw. Some fight, some freeze. I suppose a few have dignity.”

“
I
will behave with dignity,” I said. “With grace. But no poems.” I wrinkled my nose and peered down at the mouse, a tiny quivering hot spot in my hand.

The gardener leaned closer to me, or perhaps the mouse. “Little one, the truest grace comes
after
the squirming and the fighting and the panic. To accept tragedy without despair. Can you do that?” I could not tell to whom he spoke.

I did not know the answer then. But I thought about it when my father died; and when my golden-eyed lover returned to the east, betraying us all; and when Shirakawa died; and now, as I feel my lungs fight this losing war to breathe. At last, perhaps I find an answer.

To show grace in tragedy? All those irritatingly stupid women in
monogatari
tales exhibit this, with their elegant little death-poems, their lovely corpses floating on willow-clogged waters. And they
are
stupid. What man, what lost love or deceased kinsman is worth death? The space in my life that my half-brother once filled is now an aching icy pain, like the hole left after a tooth is pulled, and I am dying in weeks or months—and yet I still fight for life, as every mouse does, until the final beak-blow. The grace in tragedy is not to succumb, but to fight on.

I knew none of this back then, of course: certain lessons come late. I was eight when I received my first mouse. What did I know? I made a cage of silk gauze and wood, but it ran away, as did the next and the next. For a time, I made up little stories about the mice, as dramatic and full of event as any tale from Ise. As I learned to keep them for more than a day or two (pottery stopped them, as did wire mesh), I told fewer stories involving thrilling adventures. The more I learned of them, the less convincing the stories were, even to me. I’ve found that’s often the way with stories. Perhaps the only reason I tell the tale of the tortoiseshell cat is that, even after decades of living with cats, I still understand them not at all.

After a time I didn’t keep the mice caged, but still they stayed. Mostly it was food that kept them, though I liked to imagine it was love. They slept in my sleeves, so that I learned physical grace because I did not want to crush them. They hid in my hair and startled my tutors and nurses, if I didn’t have time to return them to their box. They allowed me to touch them, to feel their ribs fine as grass stems, the shapes of their delicate skulls. Their hearts beat fast in the palm of my hand.

I no longer kept mice when I came to court, nor did I engage in any of my less-acceptable hobbies. I wrote my notebooks strictly for my own satisfaction, though my woman Shigeko was forever asking to read them. I read the Chinese classics, because, while irregular, it was not unheard of for a woman to do so. I built water-clocks only when my monthly courses or illness kept me away from court and I returned to the cinnamon-tree courtyard at my uncle’s house.

When I came to court, I studied the first cat I met there with the same interest I had reserved for mice and other vermin. Our cat was small and gray, with blue-gray eyes. We tied bright-colored cords around her neck, choosing colors that were appropriate to the seasons, but she tore them off and played with them, tiny gaudy snakes. After a time we took to calling her Shisut
ko, the little nun, because of her dislike of finery and her soft gray color.

Shisut
ko was not exceptional in any way. She did not grow up to be arrogant, as so many cats do, and she did not grow loving, as so many of us hoped she would. She remained a creature of teeth and claws, and the only way we could show affection in an acceptable fashion was to fold paper into shapes and thread them onto string for her to chase. She slept near us, but she spent the rest of her time elsewhere. Sometimes, we heard her screaming in the garden; several months later she would vanish, and return with kittens.

We offered her bits from our food, but she was as picky as a pregnant empress. She was uninterested in sweet rice candies, but she liked fish and the hot-tasting pickled vegetables. She also begged from the kitchen house, but mostly she found her own meals, sometimes bringing them to us. I was less squeamish than the others, so it often fell to me to remove the mice and voles. I examined one once, its tiny broken bones like twigs, and blood and saliva at the back of its neck. It was panting, eyes bright and fixed on me. I killed it.

“What have you done?” one of my women gasped.

“I stopped its pain,” I said, and handed the mouse back to the cat to eat. Typically, she was no longer interested, absorbed instead in cleaning her paws, eyes half-closed as she lay in a patch of sun on the veranda. This was my first experience of a cat’s nature.

And now: My
b
has been sleeping on the sleeve of my maple-colored robes since this morning. I was wearing those robes but had not the heart to disturb her, so I slipped my arm free, and eventually discarded them altogether to change into another set, leaving her in undisputed possession. If I were to ask her what the point was of being a cat, what would she answer?

And what is the point of being a woman?

I cannot say why the tortoiseshell woman and Osa Hitachi no Nakara became close. The cat-woman expressed no affection and had little in common with Nakara, and yet they were friends. Nakara had her own concerns, so perhaps she saw the tortoiseshell woman’s grief and her strangeness, and pitied them, and her. And Nakara had certain experience with the creatures who could take human form, and it is possible that she saw a cat’s nature in her companion, and so understood not to expect what she might from a woman.

It is also true that Nakara was tired of her people, for there were only nine of them for a month’s travel; and she was used to the hundreds of people always to be found at the Osa Hitachi estate. Because she was on pilgrimage she observed the ten prohibitions, and perhaps she was bored. There had been little company on the road, and even the monks and priests at the shrines and temples had been surly, as they settled in for what was becoming a cold and wet winter.

People of the provinces are not like people in the capital, and Nakara was not like a court woman. For one thing, she spoke to all her people, men and women, even the lowliest boy brought along to tend the oxen for the trip. For another, she saw no necessity to hide her face behind fans or sleeves; she had no die-away airs. If she wanted something, she simply asked for it. If she didn’t want something, she said so—very unlike the women of court, who on occasion find themselves married because they are unwilling to say no. She could use a Chinese abacus, but was hopeless at the poem-matching game.